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Latest Web Design Trends — Afresh Inspiration From the Print

“Advertising generally works to reinforce consumer trends rather than initiating them”

This quote becomes quite contradictory in its own terms when it comes to the web designing world. Trends hold a lot of importance when when it comes to incorporating any structure, layout, design, or even a single graphic to a website.

Technology changes with each click of the mouse. Every day, at every single click, a new trend or technology emerges, which changes web design trends. It undergoes a continuous and a very fast pace.

The web world of designs is going more humane, aesthetic, and functional in appeal. As the web industry is fickle, more and more designs trends are on their full pace. Sole web presence doesn’t really work. Incorporation of interactive and attractive designs in a website was, is and will always remain important and thus won’t hamper the new emerging trends.

The best way to communicate any idea in the world of web design is a good and a subtle straight-forward design. And it acts as an icing on the cake, when a website is launched with a creative and unique layouts. It does not stop at having a great content, the entire layout and how it has been structured, decides its readability and influence on the reader.

More and more effort is being put to take inspiration from the print world, which is accompanied by headlines, quotations, multi-column text, highlighted quotations, indented text, supporting imagery, sidenotes and footnotes.

Print material ought to have a high impact on the readers keeping in mind that it should not dominate the informative part that is, the content of the website. We have tried and made an attempt to incorporate all the latest trends in web designs in the year 2010 with from specially print sources in this gleaming world of creativity.

Nature and Size of Font:

— Serif and Sans-serif: These fonts have proved themselves very apt for body texts because they are more visible and easier to read even while browsing at high resolutions.

— Big bold headings: These ought to grab readers’ attention as they are distinctly visible.

— Scrolling limit: As the web page is not bound by the constraint of a particular dimension as it happens in print. Nevertheless, a web designer has an option of the horizontal scroll bar, which is actually quite a big ‘No’ if we look it from the visitor’s point of view.

As it has already been mentioned in the starting that the new trend is inspired from the print world, and therefore, a strong grid system provides an organised structure to the web page where the designer can actually fit in the content removing all the inessentials.

Javascript:

With the advent of the higher resolutions, and the ability to show any JavaScript, it has become much more easier to avail the white space that is actually critical to the reader because it ensures proximity and a space to rest.

Inforgraphics and multi-column Layouts:

— Infographics: As the name suggests, have always remained a help in delivering the complex relationships and rations and even statistics in a more simple and effective way.

— Multi-Column Layouts: As the world of information is increasing, and Internet is becoming the hub to put in the vast resource of knowledge, multi-column layouts are becoming more and more popular.

Go for CSS3

Gone are those days when we could only animate with GIF image files and then, flash. Today, we are loaded with Flash, Silverlight, GIF, JavaScript, and even CSS3 and now, CSS4, and CSS5 as well. Rounded corners, borders, backgrounds, text and box shadows are some of the advantages, which can be made use of— usable on the old browsers as well as on the new technologies with enhanced features. The basic advantages that you tend to grab hold of CSS3 are—

* Rounded Corners: With the use of CSS3, it saves the effort of the user of generating rounded corners by directly creating them in the browser. The rounded corners, which were once stimulated with CSS, JavaScript hacks and image files, became nuch more efficient without taking the pain to download additional files.
* Adding shadows is now possible: CSS3 offers some of the most creative effects to create shadows, be it— drop shadows to the inner shadows, embossed and imprinted effects, with no effect on the loading time.
* Mobile-friendly versions: With the use of mobiles and the rapid growth of mobile web, companies prefer to go for user-friendly mobile versions of their websites and spend heavily.

Other Techniques:

* Add Crisp Illustrations: With the new trends, its time to learn creating those smooth, clean, crisp illustrations that are marked distinctive and professionally illustrated designs.
* Micro-Textures: With the introduction of ‘micro-textures’, we are able to create subtle, barely noticeable textures in the background.

The use of watercolours and handwritten and script fonts ensures a subtle, distinct, calming, and well-crafted and planned way to communicate your ideas.

Social media — It is working as an explosive in the sudden growth of sharing and communicating your ideas, creativity and connecting you to the millions of people out there. Facebook, Twitter, Blogspot, and many other social networking sites are the new ever-growing trends in the field of web designs. And being the need of the hour, designers are looking forward to the but, innovating techniques of creating a connection with the visitors through these social hubs.

“Even some of the greatest technology-led revolutions, or allegedly technology-led, really were only made possible because of trends already present” By Scott Cook

But of course, these trends have been, in one way or the other, inspired by the current trends and I, purely feel that web designing industry is subjected to changes at almost each and every hour. This blog is an attempt to mention some of the latest ongoing trends in the industry. The basic advantage of being a web designer is that you are all liberalised in a way that you can set your own trends by doing a little variation or completely changing the whole idea, as per your clients’ requirement.

Not sure what you mean by “Serif and Sans-serif: These fonts have proved themselves very apt for body texts because they are more visible and easier to read even while browsing at high resolutions.”.
Serif and Sans-serif are not fonts, they are attributes of typefaces. Since a typeface either is serif or sans-serif, you have essentially stated that ALL fonts have proved themselves to be very apt or body texts.

If you are referring to using “serif” or “sans-serif” in your CSS, then you should know that, again, these are not calls to an actual font. The style sheet is simply referring to whatever sans-serif or serif font is actually available on the client machine and that will vary.